Thanks man. To be honest, I've stopped playing the game but I just didn't want to make one of those "hey i'm gone from TF2 bye guys plus frag me" threads. One of the Aus admins hit me up and asked me if I had a followup to the original global whitelist meeting, and I wanted to keep my promise that yes we'd hold a second meeting and yes we'd take a second look at weapons that we had previously allowed through the first time (such as the Rescue Ranger and Jarate, two weapons that get a lot of complaints). Knowing that I am not playing next season, I decided to let the players dominate the conversation and let them decide what weapons to allow because ultimately they're the ones to have to play with it, not me.

So we held the second meeting at a relatively convenient time for people to attend (it's tough with the holidays). Could it have been executed better? Absolutely. Did I put my full heart and soul into this effort? Not really, to be honest, but I figured some effort is better than none. I'm putting a lot less effort into a lot of my TF2 projects these days since other things are ramping up in my day to day.

As a note about the meeting itself, I feel like most people carried over the thoughts of Valve too much into this meeting. I hardly mentioned Valve at this second meeting and am resigned to the idea that they'll slowly develop TF2 and iterate until they're ready for a sequel. Valve's competitive game doesn't have to be our focus -- we've always been a community that can stand on its own and that hasn't changed. Our objectives around the global whitelist were still to make our game the best game that it could be, and that includes getting everyone on the same page as far as rulesets go.

For future whitelist meetings, I have no doubt in my mind that someone else could take up the torch and do it better than I but I have nobody to pass the torch to. I feel as though if I didn't step up to host this meeting, it wouldn't have happened at all. I'm truly sorry that it ended up being sort of a last minute affair, but this is exactly what happened with the first meeting as well (finalizing the atomizer / base jumper bans only days before the start of the league season). I think it should be a regular thing that the community comes together to discuss -- it just takes effort to make it happen and you have to deal with the backlash of the decisions that are made. Personally, I have nothing to lose so it's cool with me. I stand by the decisions that came out of the meeting and still hope for the best for comp TF2.

I was asked to make a quick note about it on tf.tv and this seemed like the most recent thread on the topic.

Because the UGC season continued on schedule despite the ESEA season being postponed, we were unable to wait for the results of the second whitelist meeting and had to come up with our own to give to our players. We are sticking with the whitelist from the previous season, with the addition of a rescue ranger ban and a dalokohs bar unban. The status of the other unlocks discussed in the whitelist meeting will remain unchanged due to the split views the community has regarding their use. All of our 6s admins always appreciate player input and we look forward to continuing to participate in the global whitelist in future seasons.

Thanks a lot Slin for organizing the meeting. I know how much work it is to prepare to get a bunch of people into a single mumble at one time.

ozfortress, ESEA, and ETF2L are currently discussing a new whitelist based on the feedback from the global community and hopefully we should have the new whitelist ready within 24 hours.

Just use the LAN whitelist

@Mallory understandable. We can always reassess after this season and find a whitelist that brings UGC back in line with what everyone else is using as there isn't too much variation (only a couple differences in the unlocks).

I recommend that the remaining leagues work together to find an agreeable whitelist after this week of playtesting.

Can we discuss what an optimal process for this sort of thing should be?

The main issue here is that the time meant that nobody could show up.

I think this could be solved by instead having a longer discussion period of several days to allow people from different regions to have their say and everyone having a chance to give input. Maybe just a subchannel of the TFTV discord. Or two subchannels, one for good players and one for everyone.

http://whitelist.tf/6841 :D

Agreed. Giving the conversation to a smaller group of players is the right way to go, and high level players are the obvious choice. I appreciate why everyone wants to give input, but when you let everyone talk you get vastly varying opinions and five 20 page threads that can't really come up with any kind of consensus. Look at all the crap just from just the last 6 months. Separate discord channels gives room for lower level players to see where the conversation is going and offer input over a longer timeframe.

respect for this post and your effort, you've always had pretty amazing intentions
pce

idk I like the concept of everybody from different regions playing on the same whitelist and ruleset, but both of these meetings have been met with such a large backlash from the community. imo we should just revert back to how we were developing whitelists before and ditch the global whitelist project.